


Absent Aliens

by toby_or_not_toby



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Adventure, Angst, Destruction of Gallifrey (Doctor Who), Dimension Travel, Gallifrey, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Self-Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24452719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toby_or_not_toby/pseuds/toby_or_not_toby
Summary: She thinks, in the third century or so, that maybe it was intentional. Gallifrey was burning in the back of her mind, and maybe she just wanted space?It puts the tardis’ reluctance into perspective, anyhow.She lands her though, throws open the doors, and grins as best she can.And when Ryan goes to press the big red button (and she did honestly think he had learned by then that big red buttons weren’t to be pushed, but then again, she still hadn’t learned), she doesn’t yell, doesn’t warn. She just pushes him back, a second too late, and takes the blast herself.---Or, the doctor makes some very bad decisions in the wake of Gallifrey's destruction. And now she doesn't know how to get home.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 62





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to thank the fantastic Samuel (ao3 profile to come) for betaing this fic - you're a freaking legend of a human!!!!!

When they land on Thura, she doesn’t give them any instruction, and, in hindsight, that’s the beginning of it all.

She thinks, in the third century or so, that maybe it was intentional. Gallifrey was burning in the back of her mind, and maybe she just wanted space?

It puts the tardis’ reluctance into perspective, anyhow.

She lands her though, throws open the doors, and grins as best she can.

And when Ryan goes to press the big red button (and she did honestly think he had learned by then that big red buttons weren’t to be pushed, but then again, she still hadn’t learned), she doesn’t yell, doesn’t warn. She just pushes him back, a second too late, and takes the blast herself.

\---

She doesn’t end up in Rose’s dimension. Of course she doesn’t. The universe doesn’t work like that. Except when she doesn’t want it too – then it’s filled to the brim with serendipity.

She’s on Thura. And it’s deserted.

Okay, not really deserted. She’s in the middle of a jungle (or what passes as a jungle), and she can hear various birds (or what pass as birds) twittering (or what passes as twittering). There’s life everywhere, it’s teeming at the edges of her vision, pressing at her fingertips and the soles of her boots.

But she can feel it, in her head. A brand new kind of emptiness.

There are absolutely no people.

(And she had thought the silence after the Moment had been bad).

\---

She decides early on to shoot for teleportation, rather than flight. Thura’s got better raw materials for it – it was the Deosians main method of transport back in her universe…

Her universe.

And it is, isn’t it? She used to ricochet between two poles – thinking it was hers to command or thinking that nothing she did could ever make a difference.

She’s realised, in her time here, that it’s not her actions that made it hers.

It was the people.

Obvious, obvious, of course it’s obvious once she says it out loud (in the middle of a very convoluted conversation with Frederick the sparkly-looking rock). Isn’t that what she has always said? That those people, be them humans or Silurians or temporospatial abnormalities, that they were what was important?

…It had only taken a universe of distance to realise the truth of it.

\---

Interdimensional travel is rare and dangerous. Most universes that discover it rip themselves and their neighbours apart within the span of days.

The Time Lords had outlawed it. So of course, she knows the theory inside and out.

Her universe had been lucky. The Deosians are a cautious race. They test their new invention slowly, and when they rip the fabric of space-time four months in, it’s only their solar system that gets destroyed.

It’s a fixed point. Of course it is. Otherwise, she would have found a way to try to stop it.

Most wide-scale tragedies are fixed points, because if a tragedy can be averted, she gets there. Eventually. Sometimes she leaves it better. Sometimes she leaves it different.

Sometimes she leaves it so much worse.

\---

Even with all the raw materials, it takes her eleven years to build a functioning long-range teleport.

She sets it to Earth first. Of course she does. She knows herself well enough to realise her own weaknesses.

And it’s the same – teeming with life and completely empty.

She wanders what would be Cardiff, sits herself down on what would be Mermaid Quay, watches the seagulls circle overhead.

There’s no Rift here, nor anywhere else on the planet. There’s no underground races, sleeping away the centuries.

\---

She stays for a few months, then with a press of a button, she’s on Thura again.

She doesn’t know what happened in this universe. Everywhere she looks, it seems that life has stagnated, just on the brink of intelligent thought.

Maybe this plane lacks something vital. Maybe this is by someone’s design.

She would like to say it’s beautiful.

Mostly it just leaves her screaming until she knocks herself out.

(What? It’s not like there’s anyone here to judge her. Not even her tardis, who she’s known since she was fifty years old).

\---

She sets the coordinates for Gallifrey on an impulse she can no longer fight back. She would know the star system anywhere – it’s coded into her blood. When she looked at the sky, no matter what corner of the universe she used to find herself in, she could always point her way home.

She closes her eyes and presses the button (big and red, for old time’s sake), and when she opens them, she’s in the void.

…

She shoots herself back to Thura, and she’s groaning and shaking and gagging against the memory of negative pressure.

She can’t breathe – even activating her respiratory bypass doesn’t stop the vice gripping her chest.

… She’d thought she could see the grass fields one more time.

She’d thought wrong.

\---

She knows the basics of inter-dimensional coding. And she knows how to build a Cutter, but she doesn’t know how to aim it.

It takes her another seventeen years to repurpose the teleporter, get it ready for its intended use. Then it takes another five years to shrink it down until she can carry it with her. She makes it a wrist strap, for old time’s sake.

She’s domesticated the local species of bird by now, so she rigs them a feeder. It will last a hundred years, and it will slowly taper off their food, leaving them wild again. She hopes, anyway. She could stay and watch, and test it, and make sure she’s not dooming an untouched species to imminent extinction.

She doesn’t though. She takes a final glance, and she leaves.

\---

She’s the next universe over, she thinks. As much as that means anything. But it feels about right – where she’d usually feel time flowing through her, she can almost touch the edges of each reality, if she stretches.

She aims for Earth, and lands in the middle of a desert. Red sand, heat rolling down her spine.

She could try teleporting again, but she’s not sure, and she doesn’t want to risk it. So she walks. And an hour and a half later she arrives in Alice Springs, Australia.

There are people walking down the main street. Real people. She feels them in that empty, cloying space in her mind and almost doubles over on the road.

She ignores the twitch, the spark of not rightness, until it’s almost too late.

A child notices her first. He’s skipping down the road, hand clasped in someone else’s. When he meets her eyes, he grins, and she feels it.

This may be an Earth, but this is not her home.

The child tugs on his parent’s hand, and now there are two people looking, grinning. Their eyes are just a touch too wide, their movements a little too smooth as they make their way towards her. They’re drawing attention – more people stop, turn, grin and glide forwards.

She opens the wristband with trembling fingers, and breaks through the next dimensional wall a moment before they reach her. She barely looks at the new coordinates. She just goes.

\---

Her aim is to get to an interdimensional gateway. They’re remarkably rare (see aforementioned space-time ripping), but in a multiverse of infinite possibilities, there are infinite gates in existence. They’re just spaced out very sporadically, and all she has to go on is half a gut instinct and a quarter of a prayer.

So she winds up taking the scenic route

\---

She finds a world that’s a perfect mirror image. The sky is backwards, the human sun rises in the west.

She tends to stick to Earths. She knows the place almost as well as her first home.

She does try Gallifrey a few times. In one jump, the Time Lords had evolved themselves past three dimensional space. She could almost feel them in the back of her mind, but even when she stretched and strained until her vision shook and her nose dripped red onto the sand, she couldn’t reach them.

Another time, she stands in a field of grass. It’s grey. Colours had never evolved there, or at least, not colours her eyes can reach.

And once, she lands, and feels her near instantly. The Gallifreyan president. She still goes by Koschei here. Their minds connect, and the Doctor is knocked sideways by fear and pain and grief.

She falls hard on old habits, and runs.

\---

On one Earth, humans never left the waters. They’ve built beautiful cities along the sides of the Marianas Trench, lit by bubbles of glowing jellyfish. She activates her respiratory bypass and floats amongst them, watching them sign to each other amidst the pressing weight.

Their biggest city is called New York.

She tries to reach into their minds and scoop out more of their language, but she’s unfamiliar with their neural structure.

She ends up with their music instead.

\---

She lands on one Earth, and her skin starts burning.

In this universe, antimatter won the war, and positrons are tearing her to shreds, inside and out.

She barely manages to type new coordinates with what remains of her fingertips, so she isn’t planning her next jump, just praying it's anywhere better than this.

\---

When she opens her eyes (when she’s finished choking out the antimatter air cloying her lungs, when she’s finished moaning against the burning of her epidermis), she sees Zeppelins.


	2. Chapter 2

She staggers through Birmingham. The library isn’t where she remembers it being, but she’s too frazzled (too hopeful, far too hopeful) to get English to leave her mouth.

In the street, people are giving her a wide berth, avoiding her eyes completely.

She lunges at a couple, grabs at one of the men’s faces, and pulls the information directly from his brain.

\---

Pete Tyler is a successful and accomplished businessman.

He divorced his wife, Jackie Prentice, in 1986, following the death of their infant daughter, Rosie.

\---

She does find the library, eventually, and rides the lift up to the second floor. She doesn’t ask the milling librarians for help, just hacks her way past the library home screen and connects herself to the internet.

UNIT’s not that difficult to find, if you know where to look. 

And she knows where to look.

She slips into their servers, flips through their personnel, and is slapped in the face with a picture of one Martha Jones.

Her stomach still aches, and her chest is still too empty, but it helps, a little.

\---

Martha isn’t home when the doctor arrives. So she breaks in, obviously. It gives her a bit more time to make herself presentable. The constant multiverse jumping hasn’t left her particularly clean, and her clothes (although she had stolen a new set a few universes back) are threadbare and grimy.

She steals some trackies from Martha’s drawers, and proceeds to steam her bathroom up for far longer than socially acceptable.

Hot water. She really can’t overstate the brilliance of hot water. She has to drag her fingers through her hair. It’s longer than it was, and matted and clumped together with remnants of who-knows-what from who-knows-where, but she gets most of the knots out, eventually. 

She stands for a minute, lets herself breathe as the water courses over her face. Then she flips the tap to cold, which is enough of a shock to the system to force her out of the shower. She gets changed, leaves her old clothes where she dumped them (she should probably burn them at this point), and wraps a towel around her shoulders to try to keep the t-shirt dry.

She steps out of the bathroom to find twelve guns pointed in her face.

She stares at them (and the people wielding them) for a moment, trying to force her frazzled brain into gear.

“Hi!” she ends up on, and she gives them her brightest grin (hopefully makes her look friendly – might just leave her looking deranged). “I’m a friend of Martha’s. Is she around?”

And Martha strides into the room.

\---

They end up sitting in Martha’s living room, eventually, and although the guns get holstered, the tension doesn’t drain. Some of the UNIT officers have trickled out of the room, but the doctor gets the feeling that they haven’t gone far, and that if she were to even move incorrectly, the guns would be back again.

She stares at Martha over the coffee table, trying to understand all the similarities and differences between this one and her Martha in one long gaze.

Martha’s sitting on a sofa that could have come straight out of a catalogue, but she isn’t relaxed. A blind man could see the stiffness in her posture, in her hands gripped tight in front of her, in the way she glances every few seconds at the UNIT guards flanking the sofa.

Her Martha had looked older than she should have, especially after the Year that Never Was, but where her Martha was steel, this Martha was brittle, lines deeper and more pronounced against her brow.

She wonders what could have happened here, to break down a person that even the Master couldn’t really touch.

She’s not sure she really wants to find out.

\---

It was Rose. Of course it was. Even after all this time, so many things still come back to Rose.

The doctor had explained, haltingly (she hadn’t had a proper conversation with anyone in so very, very long), who she was, where she had come from.

And Martha had explained who she was here.

This Martha had met her doctor in the same time and place, battling the same Judoon ridiculousness. But she hadn’t met old sandshoes (poor bastard).

She’d met someone very different, with a face the doctor didn’t recognise, and an attitude the doctor didn’t like the sound of. This other doctor had returned the hospital to earth after they had rigged an MRI machine to send out a radiation pulse that killed every Judoon in a 100 mile radius.

The doctor could remember how she’d been before Rose, after…

After the Moment.

Rose had pulled her back from a razorblade edge.

Without Rose…

Without Rose, she was someone who could do to Martha what the master never could.

And the doctor wasn’t surprised.

\---

Torchwood doesn’t exist in this universe either, so it falls to UNIT to help settle those displaced in space and time. Martha has a list of the refugees they have settled around the United Kingdom.

One of them is a Boeshanian woman with the innate ability to warp space-time.

Martha gives her the woman’s contact details, after a while, and with much trepidation, but at the end of the day, the doctor can tell that Martha (and UNIT as a whole) just want her gone.

\---

They drive her, which is nice enough, although Martha stays behind.

The doctor can feel her watching as she is ushered into the UNIT vehicle, and she wants to turn, and smile, and frown, and wave, and say _I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry_. But she doesn’t.

She just lets the UNIT goons close the car door behind her, and tries to tune out Martha’s haunted gaze as it bores into the back of her neck, even through the blacked out windows.

She’d died here, her and the master, when Lucy Saxon had shot them both aboard the Valiant.

For that fact, at least, she is glad.

She curls her legs up under her, still clad in Martha’s sweats, and wishes she had her coat to hide in (her’s or sandshoe’s, it doesn’t matter).

\---

It’s a long, long drive to London, and the doctor doesn’t sleep.

She doesn’t bother trying to start up conversation with the driver, or the armed goon sitting next to him.

Instead, she presses her face to the glass and watches the lights blink by in steady, rhythmic intervals. And she opens her mind up, just a little, and brushes past the little human minds in the cars around them, thinking of dinners, and politics, and music, and relationships, and all the things that make them human.

It’s almost like coming home.

Almost.

\---

Jack was a 51st century Boshanian, so he’d skipped out on the innate warping abilities by a few dozen centuries. The 72nd century descendants of that peninsula (destroyed long ago by their time, but they held tight to the name, like humans so often do) had drifted into the maw of a half-destroyed tardis, and came out changed.

Most of them had died – the strain of what parts of untethered time they saw flaying their minds past the point of recognition.

Those that had survived had multiplied (like humans so often do), and repopulated, and travelled onwards.

Hurey was from the 74th century, which made all the difference.

\---

The doctor starts to feel her about 5 miles out. It’s like sandpaper against her brain, rubbing raw all the parts that have already been stretched by repeated bouts of interdimensional travel. It’s worse than Jack ever was, and by the time the car pulls up outside her front door, the doctor is blinking back tears.

Hurey knew they were coming – Martha had called her, had triple checked that she was fine with it, before sending the doctor her way – and she is standing on her balcony, gazing out over them as the car shudders to a stop.

A living, breathing interdimensional gateway.

The doctor has to force herself to uncurl, to bully her limbs into taking her weight. She makes it out, holding onto the car for support, and bites her lip bloody as she wrenches her head up and meets Hurey’s eyes.

They both flinch back, the doctor almost falling against the car before the UNIT goon grabs her arm and holds her on her feet.

At least the pain is mutual then, the doctor thinks. She’s hurt enough Boeshanians with her own discomfort.

She can’t get her feet working quickly enough, and the UNIT goon is talking at her, louder and louder and fiercer and fiercer and she is so _tired._

Then someone else is touching her arm, and the grating in the doctor’s skull ratchets up to hitherto unknown levels.

The streetlights shudder, loop over themselves and disappear as unconsciousness rushes up to greet her, and the doctor doesn’t even try to fight it.

\---

She wakes up with a gasp, too quick and painful, and then she’s hunching over on the bed (bed? No. Chair? No, sofa. It’s a sofa. Yaz has a purple sofa. Does she? No, focus) as her body tries to expel its lungs.

There’s light around her, which doesn’t make sense, because it was dark, and she tries to get a grip on the timestream, but it hurts, and oh, right, different dimension, different time, different probabilities.

She pedals backwards until her back hits the sofa’s arm, and tries to focus her eyes.

Hurey is sitting at the kitchen table on the other side of the room, red hair a near beacon in the otherwise drab furnishings (and the doctor had gotten good at finding redheads, whatever her state of mind). The doctor is glad she hasn’t come any closer, hasn’t tried to help – she doesn’t think her brain could take it right now.

She throws off the blanket (she has a blanket?) and straightens herself up as best she can, fighting her lungs until they start working for her again. It takes her a minute, but she does collect herself, as best she can with the mental presence bearing down on her from her right.

“Hello,” she manages, she thinks. She’s not sure what language it comes out in.

“Hi,” Hurey replies. Good. English then.

“So… how are you?” the doctor hedges. She wishes one of her companions was with her – they’re always better with words. Always. Regardless of their origin in the space-time continuum.

Hurey chuckles at that, and the doctor breathes out, but she can’t relax. Her shields are the only thing holding her together, and the moment she relaxes she’ll faint again and then it’s longer and longer and _longer_ that she has to wait to get home.

“I’m fine, thanks,” comes the reply, because the doctor had asked a question, hadn’t she?   
“But anyone with half a standard contemporary human psi rating can tell that you’re not.”

The doctor nods. Hurey has stood up, is closing the space between them, and the doctor thinks the only thing she can do is nod. If she tries to speak at this point she’ll scream, and the last thing she needs is to blow out the eardrums of the first person she’s seen in a hundred thousand universes that holds the power to help her.

“I’m sorry,” Hurey says, and the doctor realises she’s still nodding, she didn’t stop, how long has it been? “I’m so very sorry,” and those are her words, she’s the one who apologises to people, not this stranger, this person who makes reality itself ache, “but I’m going to have to access your mind if I want to get you home.”

And then the hands on her head and she is screaming, she can’t hold it back. And her brain tries to drop her out of consciousness, but there’s something holding her in place, making her sit under the agony as it pulses over her, through her, into her. Like a dog, tied down as it is electrocuted again and again and again and she tries to wriggle away and hide in the back recesses of her mind, but the pain is a searchlight, seeking her out wherever she tries to run, seeking her out into darkness she doesn’t even know is there…

\---

She’s on a table.

She’s on a table.

She thought she was safe. She thought she was safe, she’d been safe here finally finally FinAll-

She regenerates.

She’s on a table.

\---

Hurey is standing in front of her, but she’s blurry, swaying in and out of the doctor’s vision, like seaweed at high tide.

The doctor isn’t sure she’s existing in three spatial dimensions in quite the way she’s supposed to – the air around her is also within her a bit too much for her to be corporeal, but she’s also here too much? She’s… too spaced out, maybe? Whatever it is, English is far too inadequate to encapsulate it.

_Oh_ , Hurey is saying. Or thinking. Or feeling. Or something. _Your home. Your first home. I can’t reach that. I’m sorry – it’s not time yet. That block is there for a reason. It can’t go. I know you want it to, but it can’t. I’m sorry._

Then the force that’s been holding her in place dissipates, and the bottom drops out of reality for the last time.

\---

This time, the doctor wakes up in a hospital. Which is terrifying, at first, because 90% of human medicine can kill her in an instant (and she truly doesn’t know how many regenerations she has left after the Christmas kerfuffle).

But then her time sense slams into gear, and she has to close her eyes for a moment as reality washes in. It’s hers – her time, her continuum, and her timeline is stretching out behind her from her first (grumpy, grey, lapels, old and yet so young) to her last (she can’t see them, of course, but she can feel the pull, like Trenzelore).

It’s a multispecies hospital, situated somewhere in the Cassian belt – only a few lightyears away from Thura, from her friends, and from-

Her tardis. _Her tardis_.

She probably shouldn’t be stretching herself, not after- whatever that was (and she can’t remember what that was exactly, and that’s a scab she’s going to pick at and pick at, but later), but after an age of traveling in foreign time, the gap is nothing.

The tardis meets her halfway there, screeching and screaming in her mind, running down her spinal cord and wrapping her up in a wheezing embrace and she calls it to her side, intent on running away now that she’s home to do so.

But it won’t come.

_Yaz_ , it says. _Graham. Ryan. Come sad outside time fraction big big big. No._

_Okay_ , she replies, even though it tears at her to be so close and yet just an inch too far away, _stay with them. I’ll be there soon_.

And although she could keep up the connection, the tardis can’t, not over that distance, and she can’t tax its cortex circuits so soon after coming home.

She’ll have to wait.

\---

She worms her way out of the hospital, eventually, talks her way onto a cruiser bound towards the galactic centre (hah! Still got it!). The first thing she does, when she’s sequestered away in the bowels of her chosen transport, is take apart and meticulously destroy every single piece of her (ratty and old by this point) interdimensional Cutter. 

She’s had her fun. That’s not a medium she will ever toy with again. Ever.

It takes about three human weeks, or about five eighths of a Gallifreyan month (or exactly 2 squabs of a Frogstarian B leap-year) for her to get herself onto Thura, and then two more days of international travel to get to where she had left the fam.

She doesn’t cry when she sees the tardis – she’s done enough of that for a long, long time – but she may or may not barrel her way in, crash into the first piece of the tardis that she can wrap her arms around, and stay there for a good few hours.

If there was any doubt before, it’s gone now. This is _her_ tardis, and she is home.

The keys rattle in the tardis door, and the doctor looks up, and she doesn’t know what to say to them. Hundreds of years to think on it, and still she can only draw blanks.

Ryan is the first one to see her, but his shriek-and-flail performance pulls the attention of the others pretty quickly.

The doctor goes to skim their surface thoughts, to try to work out how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, how she can exonerate herself as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

But she stops herself.

She’s done enough mind meddling recently (recently for _Rassilion_ – to say English isn’t a very temporally minded language is tantamount to saying the master isn’t a perfect person). This is her fam. And it’s about time that she let them be a fam to her too.

“Where the hell have you been?” Yaz asks, hands on hips, eyebrows pulled low and tight and defiant, and the doctor flicks through a thousand possible responses and goes to say them all but all she ends up with is-

“Gallifrey was destroyed.”

And the doctor thinks, maybe that right there, is the first time she’s told the fam the truth.

\---

Grayam, Ryan and Yaz had been on Thura for two months, the doctor finds out, over tea and biscuits and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

They’d waited around for three weeks, wandering through the tardis’ infinite recesses, but with no way to pilot her (and thinking maybe they were stuck on an alien world for the rest of their lives), they had ventured out and joined Thurian society.

Ryan found a job in a pre-school, as a PhysEd assistant teacher. The school in question got notable publicity for hiring an off-worlder.

Yaz was working sanitation, which she originally hadn’t been thrilled with. But Thurians, despite their ridiculous technological advancements, had never invented flushable toilets. Yaz had mentioned the idea to her boss and been promoted to vice president of the federal department of waste management.

(at least someone, somewhere, knew to give her the promotions she was due).

Graham was a bus driver. They had busses on Thura – two types, manual and automatic. Right pedal for acceleration, left for break.

Serendipity.

Just two days before she arrived, they’d started to seriously consider the prospect that the doctor wouldn’t be coming back for them.

The doctor doesn’t say much as they fill her in, just nods, ums and aahs, grins in the right places.

They hadn’t questioned her further on her comment – strange, for Yaz especially – but the doctor had felt the shock, followed by the horror.

Her companions had been with her on Orphan 55, and although they couldn’t truly understand her grief, they could come closer than most.

The conversation dies down, slowly, peters into dribs and drabs that not even Graham’s jokes can prop up, and they’re left sitting across from one another. And the doctor looks at her companions, and she thinks.

She hadn’t chosen these ones, not like she’d done with Rose, or Donna, or Bill. She had said her goodbyes, rigged up her teleport, and left, never to see them again (she’d thought). And here they were, battered and bruised, and already so changed by life at her side.

Yaz, who had spent their first meeting trying so hard to follow police procedure, who had been so desperate to prove herself, had hardened, iron replacing brittle bronze.

Graham, near crushed with grief, now able to sympathise with any life-form he encountered.

And Ryan, angry and closed, with his dyspraxia hanging over his every thought, word, and action, had grown into a grandson (and a man who knew himself).

The doctor knows that her ability to take a good human and absolutely destroy them is paralleled only by Koschei. 

But she hasn’t ruined these ones (yet), and (so far), she is so very proud of the people they’ve become.

\---

“What was Gallifrey like?”

The question comes that night (as much as night means anything aboard the tardis). The fam had decided they needed a night’s sleep before returning home, so the doctor had coaxed the tardis into the void and programmed her to float there for the 8-hour stretch her humans would require.

Graham and Ryan had gone to bed a few hours previously, and the doctor thought that Yaz had too.

But the girl (well, woman, really) drops down next to her on the floor of the console room. She’s got cups of cocoa, and she passes one over to the doctor.

The doctor takes it, wraps her hands around it, let’s the warmth seep into her palms. She doesn’t look at Yaz directly, but glances at her in periphery.

Yaz isn’t looking at her, instead gazing forward, eyes fixed on the tardis door. Steam from her cup is rising still, settling on her cheeks and eyelashes.

The question hangs heavy between them.

Yaz had asked about Gallifrey before. And the doctor had always dodged (badly, there was only so much she could do when the planet in question was burning behind her eyes).

But it had been… well. She really had lost count. A couple hundred years, maybe, since then.

And she’s the only one left (again, oh for _Rasillion_ , she had finally thought…) that can remember the place with any semblance of nostalgia.

She wants, no, needs, to share the pieces that she can. The words are bubbling in her chest, fighting for freedom, for recognition.

She just doesn’t know where to begin.

No. That’s not true. She knows exactly where.

She clears her throat, grips her cup tighter, then drags out the first sentence – like barbed wire from a pouring wound.

“There were fields of red grass, stretching out as far as your eye could see, and we ran through them for hours and hours and hours.”

And if she keeps talking, forever, about her prison of a palace of a home, maybe the old wound will hurt a little bit less (eventually).

She’ll have to wait and see.


End file.
